If you're talking theoretical DPS, yes, but for sustained damage, I'd argue not much different. A lot easier to keep pumping that damage into an enemy with lasers than rails.... unless you're a rail using god.
Rail guns are the worst weapons in game, worse than the mining lance
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If you're talking theoretical DPS, yes, but for sustained damage, I'd argue not much different. A lot easier to keep pumping that damage into an enemy with lasers than rails.... unless you're a rail using god.
I write about it all the time at the first opportunity. And I'll say it again. Mining Lance is simply broken. When they introduced explorer and combat modes, they simply forgot about it, it does not switch to combat mode.It's really high time FD buff the mining lance. Kinda awful to pledge to a Power only to get a special module which is the butt of jokes. No offense to the Torval community
I'm talking about very actual DPS.
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I am moderately successful with railguns -- I GENERALLY hit what I aim at, at least in 50% of the cases. 
I use them to annoy enemies and draw them into range of my PVE corvette (long range w. plasma slug), and also to damage modules. Works fairly well.
PAs... don't get me started. I KNOW they offer excellent damage & ignore resistances, but I am an extremely poor shot with those. In PVE, I generally manage to hit big ships, but small ones . . . they'll die of old age before I get to 'em.
I use them to annoy enemies and draw them into range of my PVE corvette (long range w. plasma slug), and also to damage modules. Works fairly well. PAs... don't get me started. I KNOW they offer excellent damage & ignore resistances, but I am an extremely poor shot with those. In PVE, I generally manage to hit big ships, but small ones . . . they'll die of old age before I get to 'em.
Penetration depth determines the angles from which modules are vulnerable. It's usually a fraction of the z-height of the ship being shot, which is why most modules on most ships can only be hit by low penetration weapons from near perpendicular angles.
Rails have such a high penetration depth that angle is almost totally irrelevant, but normal rails still stop at the first module they encounter. Super penetrator makes it so that interposing modules don't stop the shot. You can see this in the video I linked, when I finally start cycling module targets...that Corvettes FSD is severely damaged, despite being in the geometric center of the ship, because I was putting shots through the engines and power plant behind it.
That's mostly correct.
A successful penetration still delivers the non-penetration damage portion to the hull. Rails have an extremely high penetration damage ratio, so the hull damage on a successful penetration is marginal.
No question that rails are superior DPS to almost anything (that doesn't have enormous thermic resistance) where one can land the shots and keep them supplied with ammunition for the intended duration.
However, those qualifiers are important. There is a pretty good learning curve on rails that is complicated by ships of poor convergence and different hardpoint sizes (thus charge duration). And even if I were better at rails, I'd still like fixed lasers in conjunction with auto-tracking kinetics (for simultaneous convergence) for scenarios where fighting other CMDRs is mostly going to be incidental, as I don't like trading armor for fuel to keep plasma charge rails fed, and I like relying on synthesis even less.
I can take a fixed laser/gimbaled MC boat and do ten back-to-back wing assassination missions or sit in a CZ for three hours without needing to rearm. With a rail boat, I'd be interrupting what I was doing much more often, or flying giant fuel tanks around (not that quad SRB plasma slug rails can't be fun from time to time).
Rails are moderately done in by their damage mix. 2/3rds thermal and 1/3rd kinetic. So, your damage output is less than it appears to be both against shields and hull thanks to resistances. There isn’t that nice absolute damage portion like there is for PAs.
Mixing has nothing to do with it. Absolute is good because it has no resistance.
You're missing the point. Read what I said again.
I often run a DBS and found that small rails are useful. I have G5 lightweight rails and G5 short range blasters, depending on the reason I’m flying. I go with super penetrators.
I use medium gimballed G5 efficient pulse lasers with the small rails.
In short, a small rail gun is fun in a small and agile vessel… you get good bang for the buck. Great for sniping modules. That’s probably what most rail fans enjoy the most about them.
When I use the DBS in a CZ, the medium pulses do much of the work, but I don’t often do CZs with rails. I usually swap them out for overcharged MCs. But I can still complete a CZ in my DBS with small rails and medium pulse lasers.
The rails are more effective when using them in bounty hunting, because the NPCs there are running weaker ships than in the CZs.
Just my $0.02.
IIRC, I saw an old dev post that indicated different weapons had a different inherent penetration depth. Rails had the max depth possible, while other types had different penetration depths based on the weapon type. As far as I know, that value doesn't change based on engineering.
News - Discussion with Mark Allen on damage and defenses
Greetings Commanders, Recently and over time, we've seen a fair amount of discussions regarding game mechanics, such as damage and defenses. Mark Allen joins us today to discuss such! There's been a fair bit of discussion and several questions/issues raised about the damage mechanics in Elite...
Yeah, though I built it just because I didn't have to worry about ammo, and because I didn't want to worry about chaff either. It works better than any other smaller ship, and it's just ultimately a really good bounty hunter.
For PvE, a lot of PvP players might not realize but the main problem with PvE builds is that they aren't designed to kill 1 elite anaconda and then rearm, mainstay of them is being able to kill like 40x ships in a row or something without having to rearm. So you can get 15-20 million bounties to hand in for BGS or so you can complete 3 CZ's before rearming.
I do BGS all the time so I guess I'm one of those guys who just cares about efficiency. So I'm not gonna fly a super fun build in CZ's I'll just fly a corvette with beams and multis.
So... it should mean something to you that my go-to bounty hunting ship is a rails phantom! It's not just fun or off-meta but it's actually good if bounty hunting is what you wanna do. You can go either with the Phantom or the MkII, it's about preference I guess, I chose the Phantom because I just like it. Stack pirate massacre missions and you'll complete all of them before you even run out of 50% of your fuel.
Plus I'm pretty sure the infinite premium synth ammo trick still works with plasma slugs.
Interesting, thanks for dredging that up. So if a shot makes the roll (based on weapon chance to do so) to penetrate armor, and if it did not hit an external module they then use shot direction and the depth that weapon can penetrate to plot a line through the target ship, then any module "sphere" that line intersects has a random chance to be the module that takes the damage, with "how dead-on the hit to its sphere was" weighting the decision.IIRC, I saw an old dev post that indicated different weapons had a different inherent penetration depth. Rails had the max depth possible, while other types had different penetration depths based on the weapon type. As far as I know, that value doesn't change based on engineering.
News - Discussion with Mark Allen on damage and defenses
Greetings Commanders, Recently and over time, we've seen a fair amount of discussions regarding game mechanics, such as damage and defenses. Mark Allen joins us today to discuss such! There's been a fair bit of discussion and several questions/issues raised about the damage mechanics in Elite...forums.frontier.co.uk
Same here, sometimes LR and sometimes SRB, nice to have a big enough PP to go low emissions as well to help with heat. For all out efficiency though if I just want to mow through CZs it is a Chieftain with 3 Cytos and the rest SRB MCs.
PvP builds like 5PA FDLs are perfectly capable of finishing CZs without rearming, the ammo pool is not much of a problem.
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I think they have a longer range too which can help if you're building a laser mining cutter with some far back hardpoints.
Yeah they are pretty decent at it, but unfortunately it is still more efficient to go with beams/multis which are really boring. It's just hold down the button until they die
I like to make a load-out that has a balance of Lasers and Cannon. Efficient Pulse and Overcharged Cannon to be specific. I can continuously fire the Pulse to keep up pressure and remove the shields, then I pop them open with the cannon. Conserving ammo via trigger control on the cannon has become part of my method and a way to grade my performance. Sniping at an FSD or a PP keeps my focus up, and make the best use of the 105 rounds I get to start with.
What is the SRB meaning?
Recently learned you can get a slightly better version by just going to the torval mining company station and buying one for some materials.It's really high time FD buff the mining lance. Kinda awful to pledge to a Power only to get a special module which is the butt of jokes. No offense to the Torval community
Short Range Blaster.
More heat, more damage and less range (although it only effects the portion of the range after damage drop off starts). Best used on faster more manouverable ships if we're talking railguns (or PAs for that matter)